Almost every business has a digital landscape into which various tools and processes fit. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is like a single tree in that landscape, growing next to all the others in the forest. But nearly half of RPA projects Fail. Why? Businesses tend to approach RPA as a cost-reduction tool, a point solution to mitigate labor or process issues. That goal falls short. Larger goals that drive success should be the focus of digital projects, like improving customer retention, compliance, or data reliability – goals that create value. RPA could thrive in these broad landscapes, but only in concert with the entire picture.
With the prospect of virtually eliminating certain manual tasks, like logging in to and pulling data from software, it isn’t surprising that global spending on RPA is still expected to top $1.58B for 2020. Companies currently using it plan almost unanimously to ramp up in 2021. But why the popularity if doing RPA right isn’t a plug-and-play venture.
There’s a number of phenomena contributing to misconceptions about RPA: Low code apps, gaining quickly in popularity and abundance, put into the hands of business teams tools formerly wielded by IT teams. The relative immaturity of the RPA market leads both to increased enthusiasm and a lack of understanding about which projects create the most value. And the cost-reduction mindset so pervasive in automation leads to wrongly aimed RPA projects.
These red flags don’t mean RPA is something to avoid. They just call attention to avoidable pitfalls besetting the industry, pitfalls especially important for small and medium businesses with tighter margins.
In an ideal world, companies looking at RPA could explore at little or no cost which process automations drive the most value, testing hypotheses and experimenting with different tasks before deploying. This isn’t an ideal world, though. Currently, there’s a significant cost just to explore what automations might provide value – as evidenced by RPAs high failure rates. Thus, expert help is critical.
Because bots are most successful when given simple, highly repeatable tasks, it can take a developer mindset to determine the feasibility and scalability of RPA. Forrester found that “finding enough tasks to automate is the biggest scale issue” for RPA projects. Even if tasks appear the same over and over from a business perspective, there’s often too much variation in the underlying details to be a truly valuable automation. Having the expertise to dive beneath the hood and dig into those details is an invaluable resource.
And then there’s how well RPA fits into the larger digital blueprint. A piecemeal approach drives failure, seeing RPA as a one-off solution rather than a piece of the whole automation puzzle. It’s not enough to use RPA as a cost-cutting tool. Bettering customer experience, improving reporting accuracy or timeliness, bolstering compliance, these are broader digital goals for whose success RPA could be a boon, and they’re all multi-pronged efforts that require balanced approaches.
If the goal is adding value to a business process, RPA might be one or more steps along that path. Whether it is or not, companies in partnership with experts can better vet a use case and decide which tools fit best with the long-term objectives.
[bctt tweet=”treating RPA like the proverbial fix-all hammer will leave a lot of nails unpounded” username=”gointerject”]
Considering the majority of companies experience one or more failures with RPA, approaching it as a possible tool to accomplish one part of a larger goal is actually the shortcut, because treating RPA like the proverbial fix-all hammer will leave a lot of nails unpounded – something we call technical debt, which has to be repaid eventually.
Just these few points make clear how RPA can go wrong or right depending almost solely on how a company thinks about the problem RPA will solve.
If automation is on your roadmap, find and make friends with experts. Be ready to jettison RPA for a tool better-suited to solve your problem, or think of it as a catalyst to more permanent solutions. Build a use case according to how it helps reach a larger business purpose, and make sure value is the goal, not cost reduction. The only shortcut is to think long term.
Bill Erickson is Interject’s communications manager
For more info on Interject’s solutions, email communications@gointerject.com